Protesters in NY’s Zuccotti Park have marked two full months of occupation in their stand against corporate corruption of politics on Wall Street with regrettable strife – Set aside that police were recently sent in to move the OWS participants out of the park – now we have lost and destroyed library books…

The OWS People’s Library, with more than 5,000 books cataloged and stored in the park, was confiscated three days ago. Apparently, even though Mayor Bloomberg made sure that those concerned would know where to pick the books up, after the raid, the OWS librarians found that between 2,000 and 4,000 books were still missing. via Slate – “OWS Library: Thousands of Books Missing, Destroyed”

It’s been a mad week of news, fraught and furled by tweet upon tweet of updates and re-updates, rumor-quashing and finger-pointing. The OWS Library has it’s own blog – with the recent update: ““There are only about 25 boxes of books; many of the books are destroyed. Laptops here but destroyed. Can’t find tent or shelves.””

Aside from the Wall Street tumult, we have some encouraging news to offset the disconcerting wave of book store closures. Bestselling author Ann Patchett, author of State of Wonder (2011), is opening her own independent bookstore, Parnassus Books, down in Nashville, in reaction to a recent spat of closures of book retailers in that city.

Her approach, as the New York Times reports, is to follow the lead of other similar, small, independent book stores working to survive in the Amazon age, by “being small and sleek, with personal service, intimate author events and a carefully chosen rotation of books.”